Paramedic develops mass casualty incident app
Thursday, 11 February 2021
NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth  An electronic patient triage and tracking system for mass casualty incidents has been developed and tested by an intensive care paramedic with experience of the Christchurch earthquakes and mosque shootings. Dean Brown, chief executive and founder of Triage-Plus, tells eHealthNews.nz that when there is a mass casualty incident, hospitals need to know how many patients are coming, how sick they are and when they will arrive. The new tool makes that possible by providing a real-time dashboard of information that can be used by any organisation involved in responding to the incident, such as hospitals, ambulance services, civil defence and police. “It makes the information available to everyone at the same time using simple technology,” he says. In a mass casualty incident, first responders triage patients and attach a colour coded tag or wrist band to indicate their status. Triage-Plus uses tags with an RFID chip so this information is instantly accessible to those who need it and all patients are geo-tagged so they can be easily located again. When a paramedic starts treatment, they scan the tag using the Triage-Plus app and can enter information such as gender, chief complaint and any vital signs they have taken. When the patient is transported to hospital, the tag is scanned again and information entered about where they are headed and their estimated time of arrival. “Most often hospitals have no idea what will be walking through the door,” explains Brown. By providing data in real-time, Triage-Plus allows hospitals to better plan resources for patients coming in. In December 2020, the app was trialled with the New Zealand Defence Force at a training exercise with St John Ambulance Service, Fire and Emergency New Zealand, New Zealand Police and emergency clinicians. During the simulation involving 200 patients, the scene commanders and the Emergency Operations Centre were provided with live updates on patient numbers, triage status and location, something which currently takes time and requires multiple agencies communicating across multiple platforms. Brown won a $30,000 TSB Good Stuff grant to help develop and test Triage-Plus. The app is going into phase two trials with St John Ambulance and Brown hopes to have some early adopters in April. There is also interest from overseas in the system. Read more Clinical software news
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